"Denial of Service" (DoS) refers to a threat category where an attacker aims to disrupt a system's availability, making it unusable for legitimate users. This can be achieved by overloading the system with excessive, often illegitimate, requests, exhausting its resources and preventing valid users from accessing services. Examples include a DDoS attack flooding a server with traffic or LLM exploits that consume computational resources by manipulating context windows.
Note
An attacker locks a legitimate user out of their account by performing many failed authentication attempts.
